


fathoms below

by purple01_prose



Category: Epic (2013)
Genre: Blood Drinking, Blood Magic, Dark, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Loneliness, Manipulation, mermaid au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-13
Updated: 2013-08-13
Packaged: 2017-12-23 08:01:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,529
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/923867
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/purple01_prose/pseuds/purple01_prose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Mermaids have a history of tempting sailors down into the depths, where they drown them. But sandwiched between the stories of horrible drownings, there is a shadow of a tale of someone who is not a mermaid’s usual prey—a young girl. The story isn’t clear if she was lured away or chose it herself, but the result is the same—she vanished, never to be seen again by her family. Still, there are sailors who would claim that they saw her, fins and all, in the years after her disappearance.” --Bomba Radcliffe, "On Mermaids"</p>
            </blockquote>





	fathoms below

**Author's Note:**

> Dedicated to kemiobsesses, because your art inspired the trail that led to this particular thought.

“Mermaids have a history of tempting sailors down into the depths, where they drown them. But sandwiched between the stories of horrible drownings, there is a shadow of a tale of someone who is not a mermaid’s usual prey—a young girl. The story isn’t clear if she was lured away or chose it herself, but the result is the same—she vanished, never to be seen again by her family. Still, there are sailors who would claim that they saw her, fins and all, in the years after her disappearance.”

\--Bomba Radcliffe, “On Mermaids”

 

\--

 

Dad’s house is on a rocky cove on the coast of Maine. The water’s almost always grey, just like the sky, but he has a little pier, with a dinghy and an actual motorboat. The house is large and empty, echoing with the laughter of previous generations, but it’s just them now.

 

Mom’s quiet laughter rings in the space of MK’s head. She’s used to living in cities far busier than this, with smaller space but happier company. With Dad taking the motorboat out at dawn and coming back after dark (“research,” he says, and she rolls her eyes. Only the Paranormal Institute that he works for actually thinks mermaids exist), she’s alone most of the time.

 

It was wonderful the first few days, when she kept thinking about how awful the funeral was and crying every half an hour to three hours.

 

By day four, she’s ready to start climbing the walls. Dad leaves her mostly in charge with what money he does make, and she goes out, buys groceries and tries to avoid the whispers about what a nutter her father is, running back home because she can’t take the stares.

 

Day six, she realizes she can take the dinghy out into the cove if the weather’s not terrible. Dad would never know, since he just refills the gas either way.

 

So instead of dragging a chair out onto the widow’s walk to sketch, she takes a bottle of water into the dinghy, finds a nice place to stop, and she sketches all afternoon, every afternoon, when it’s not raining.

 

On day eleven, when she’s playing Beethoven through the tiny iHome her phone is connected to, she’s startled when a pod of about seven dolphins surround the dinghy and butt it playfully. When she looks up, one of the dolphins splashes her with its tail fluke, and she’s startled into a laugh as she sticks her sketchbook underneath her sweatshirt to protect it. “Like the Beethoven?” she asks, and a second dolphin pops its head out of the water to chitter at her. She laughs in response, and the dolphins start to play around the dingy, chasing and splashing each other. She pulls up her knees and wraps her arms around them, watching them play and for the first time, not hearing the echoes of Mom’s laughter in her head.

 

\--

 

“Mermaids are capricious; unlike sirens, who have been reported to attack anyone unfortunate enough to travel through their waters, mermaids are a roaming species, and they may let as many as five to ten ships pass them by and then attack a small fishing boat. There are no known patterns or variables that can be linked—it is as though mermaids chose that ship for their amusement alone.”

\--Bomba Radcliffe, “Mermaid Behavior”

 

\--

 

The dolphins visit her one day out of five for the next few weeks. She knows it’s the same pod, because the leader female has a scar that runs down her chest to her belly. It looks like she tangled with a shark.

 

As she starts to really _observe_ , she picks up smaller identifying marks. The leader is Tiana, because she’s MK’s absolute favorite Disney princess. The two younger females become Merida and Rapunzel (Rapunzel’s really sweet; Merida likes to tease one of the boys, Erik), and the youngest female (she’s still watched over carefully by Rapunzel and Tiana) is Aggie. The three males—Erik, the next-youngest, Jim, and Puck—all watch over the females of the pod and play with the young ones while Tiana rules with an iron flipper.

 

She likes to watch them play, and though they never let her touch them, they’re happy to come if she’s playing Beethoven, Bach, or Haydn. She doesn’t play them every day, but she does like to listen to them while she’s focusing on her sketches instead of brooding, and when the dolphins play, she’s definitely not brooding.

 

One day, there’s someone else in the pod, someone she doesn’t recognize. It doesn’t come up for air with the pod, but she does see a flash of silvery flukes, so she thinks maybe a traveling loner male, but loner males usually get chased off, so she’s a little confused but doesn’t think more of it.

 

On week six, day three, (with the dolphins’ pattern, this should be a dolphin day), she’s surprised when she gets out there, starts playing Rossini (they seemed like they liked it when she played it last), and no dolphin appears around the dinghy to splash her or chitter at their fellows.

 

It’s a little uncomfortable until a swimmer pops his head out of the water.

 

The water’s murky, so she sees his naked chest (with some interesting scarring, how does one get a cut that jagged across the pectoral? Knife fight?), but nothing else, and he rests his arms on her dinghy, scrutinizing her with dark brown eyes. His wet brown hair is plastered to his head, and his eyes are a little too big, with strange lidding.

 

She’s uncomfortable in a weird way, but he gestures her forward, so she moves over a little, and she moves her hand over the edge of the dinghy and hisses—the dinghy’s old, and there’s a rough edge which she _just_ placed her hand on, and her hand is now bleeding all over the place. “Fuck,” she mutters, looking for something to clean it up with, she usually carries paper towels on dolphin days—

 

The boy grabs her wrist and pulls her forward. She catches herself awkwardly before she’s dragged into the water, and he examines her hand carefully before looking up at her.

 

Her hand _really_ hurts, and she tries to tug her wrist out of his grip, but despite the strange slickeriness to his skin (it feels almost like dolphin skin, now that she thinks about it), he’s able to hold onto her and she promptly freezes when he raises his face to her hand and starts to lick at her wound.

 

Of course, she’d get a kinky swimmer.

 

“Um, stop,” she says, cringing as she feels his tongue slide across her cut. It’s not only gross (human mouths, _ew_ ), but it makes the cut throb, and she moves closer to him so she has a better angle to wrench her wrist out of his grasp, and in response, he finally takes his mouth off her wrist to plant her palm against his forehead, and as she glares at him, he places his other hand against her forehead, closing his eyes.

 

There’s the lightest of touches on her brain, like a very slight pressure, and then his eyes open again, and he releases her. She moves away from him, clutching her hand, but it doesn’t hurt anymore, and when she looks down, the cut’s gone like it never existed. When she looks back up, the boy’s grinning, and his teeth look weird—almost like they’re serrated. But that’s impossible, humans don’t _have_ serrated teeth. “I am Nod,” he says in a heavily-accented voice. She can’t place the accent—one moment, it sounds Canadian, the next Midwestern United States. “You are?”

 

“MK,” she says, glancing down at her hand again. She was _so sure_...

 

“EmmKay?” Nod knots his brow, crossing his arms on the dinghy and holding himself up.

 

“MK,” she repeats. “Short for Mary Katherine.”

 

“M. K.” he nods, smiling. Then his smile drops. “You—are sad,” he seems like he’s struggling with words, before he says, “Your heartsong—it is slow.”

 

“My mother died several weeks ago,” she says, wondering what boy uses words like ‘heartsong.’ “I’m still mourning her. I live with my dad up in that house,” she turns to look at the house as she gestures to it, and had she looked at Nod then, she would have seen his eyes go dark with bloodlust and his fangs prick over the edge of his lip, but when she turns back to him, he looks sad.

 

“It is difficult—without mothers,” he stumbles. “They give us—place. Purpose. Without mothers, what are we?”

 

“You sound like an orca,” she says dryly. “Males have little status in their pods—once their mothers die, they usually die shortly thereafter.”

 

Nod looks a little confused as he parses through her words, but when she finishes, he nods as thought he understands. “Your heartsong is sad,” he repeats.

 

MK rests her chin on her knees, wrapping her arms loosely around herself.  “My mom wouldn’t want me to waste away,” she says, mostly to herself, “but there’s like no one around. My dad leaves during the day, and the people in town avoid me.”

 

“You are lonely,” Nod summarizes, blinking his weird eyes. He nods again. “Loneliness can kill.”

 

“You said it,” she mutters.

 

“So you come here, listen to dolphins,” Nod says. He narrows his eyes. “You should not be alone.”

 

She rolls her eyes. “Yeah, weird swimmer boy who licks the hands of new girls he meets. Tell me about how I should live my life.”

 

Nod blinks, before diving back down into the water. She moves over, tries to see where he went, but he must be training for the Olympics or something, because she doesn’t see him come back up as she hears her dad puttering back into their cove.

 

“Mary Katherine!” he’s waving his arms and shouting. She winces—sound carries over water, and he really doesn’t need to bellow. “You’ll never _believe_ what I found today!”

 

“And I’m sure you’re going to tell me about it anyway,” she mutters, moving the dinghy to follow her dad home.

 

\--

 

“Mermaids are social; the mermaids who travel alone are often forced to by their family group for somehow being ‘wrong,’ and it is those beings who ultimately end up tangled in netting or beach themselves. The groups are led by two alpha figures, similar to wolf packs, and to the mermaid, the family unit is everything. If there is no family, there is no life.”

\--Bomba Radcliffe, “Mermaid Behavior”

 

\--

 

The dolphins revert back to their usual pattern, but every so often she sees that stranger among them. She never sees their front, only their tail, and after a while, she begins to realize that it’s not the right size for a dolphin tail. The flukes are too long, and they flutter in the water. The color isn’t quite right either—it’s more of a silver where the dolphins (true Atlantic Bottlenose) are a matte grey in the water, not shiny.

 

It sends a chill down her spine.

 

Nod shows up every so often, absolutely curious about her life. Since she has no one else to talk to, she talks to him, and even though he struggles with the language (she wonders if his first language isn’t English—he doesn’t pronounce difficult words with an accent, but he pronounces words like he’s figuring out the dictionary meaning as he’s saying them, leading to a stilted speech pattern), they manage to communicate.

 

One day, he brings two other swimmers with him, a bare-chested woman of color with deep brown hair touched with gold (her eyes match), and the other a white man, also shirtless, with silver hair and blue eyes. Like Nod, they just pop out of the water, and they must all be Olympians because she never sees them coming up for air before they see her.

 

The woman doesn’t speak, just watches her with those too-big eyes and an enigmatic smile. The other male speaks as stilted as Nod, but there’s an Irish undertone to his words in how he pronounces things.

 

So...three Olympians of _maybe_ different countries training together. In Maine. She’s confused, but every time she asks Nod about his training, he looks as confused as she feels.

 

The second male identifies himself as Ronin and the woman as Tara. They all have serrated teeth and slickery skin that reminds her more and more of dolphins. She doesn’t understand how Tara can swim topless in the frigid Maine water—she can barely stand to have the surf cover her ankles.

 

Well. Tara’s an Olympian. Obviously she’s more hardcore than MK is.

 

“You are alone,” Ronin says, but while the words are harsh, his tone is gentle. Loneliness is a big deal for him, just like it is for Nod. “You are not--,” he grimaces as he looks for the right word, “Not _wrong_. Why do your people cast you out?”

 

“My dad,” she says, hunching her shoulders and stuffing her hands in her pockets. “He’s kinda sorta insane. He’s determined to believe mermaids exist, and his fascination drove my mother away. When she died, there was no one to take me in except my father.”

 

“He leaves her for the day, every day,” Nod tells Ronin.

 

Ronin’s eyes harden and turn darker. The snarl that rips out of his chest startles MK, and she feels a thrill of fear go down her spine. That wasn’t a human snarl. “He casts you out from his group,” Ronin growls.

 

“He doesn’t really have one,” MK offers.

 

Tara lays a hand on Ronin’s arm, and when he looks at her, Tara’s eyes glimmer. Ronin seems to understand what she’s _not_ saying, and he turns back to her. “You have no people of your own?”

 

“The law won’t let me stay with them,” she says awkwardly. How does he not know this?

 

“Law?” Nod looks _very_ confused.

 

“We have rules saying that a child must be raised with a parent or guardian until they turn 18,” MK explains, wondering at them. “I can only live with them if my father refuses to take me in. He took me in, so here I am.”

 

Ronin snarls again, a deeper, more predatory sound, and MK shudders this time. She wants to leave—she’s not sure she likes any of them, they’re too alien to her, and they’re too interested in her for her to be completely comfortable with the situation. The familiar sound of her father’s motorboat comes over the water, and Tara drops into the water, but MK sees a flicker of gold in the grey depths, and wonders why she’s wearing a gold bikini bottom. Ronin’s next to go, and Nod follows—reluctantly. He pops out of the water just as her father’s boat clears the turn of the cove, and he waves, before going back under.

 

How do they do that, anyway? She’d really like to know.

 

“Did you find anything new today, Dad?” she asks resignedly.

 

Dad shakes his head, looking gloomy. “I saw a few whales—two right whales, but they went right by me.  No dolphins at all, though I think I saw a porpoise breach around lunchtime. Did you get much sketching done?”

 

She looks down at her black sketchbook, at her idle illustrations of Nod and his various facial expressions, and she closes it with a snap. “Not really.”

 

“How about noodles for dinner?” he offers as they pull up to their small pier. He ties his motorboat first, before tying the dinghy. He offers her a hand, but she declines, stepping carefully onto the wooden deck, looking back out onto the cove. For a moment, she peers out—is that a dolphin jumping out of the water?—but then she turns back to her dad. “Noodles sound fine.”

 

\--

 

“While the impression of mermaids and their appearance has varied over the centuries, many cultures agreed that mermaids had fishlike tails in jewel tones. However, research has proven this to be false; excepting the alpha, the mermaid’s tail colors are often in the colors of the waters of which they primarily live, so tropical mermaids are more likely to have green or blue tails, while mermaids far to the north will have deep blue or silver tails. It is the alpha who has the jewel toned-tail, likely to call attention to the group in the depths, where light is dim. As to the fishlike aspect, that has also now been proven to be false, as mermaids are more similar to dolphins than sharks, so their flukes move up and down instead of side-to-side, and they are not scaly at all.”

\--Bomba Radcliffe, “On Mermaids”

 

\--

 

The next time Nod comes by (again, sans dolphins), she finally decides to let him up onto her dinghy. He’s been hanging out in the chilly Maine water, and while she finds him odd, she’s decided he’s fairly harmless, and he doesn’t frighten her the way Ronin does. Yet when she offers, he looks at her strangely, before refusing.

 

“Isn’t the water cold?” she asks him.

 

He shakes his head. “Not to my kind.”

 

His kind—fellow Olympic swimmers? Oh god, that settles her secret suspicion that the Olympic committee actually breeds their competitors. “Do you train every day?”

 

“No,” Nod shakes his head, and he vibrates in the water, “I don’t train.”

 

“Then why are you in the water so much?”

 

“I live here,” he says with frustration.

 

“Well, I feel that way sometimes too,” she agrees, “but the water’s too cold for me.”

 

“Your father—has he accepted you into his group yet?”

 

“No,” she says softly, looking down. He reaches across, laying his wet hand on her wrist. She startles, again, at his touch—he doesn’t feel quite human, but his skin is warm, warmer than she’d think for him being in cold water.

 

“Your heartsong is still slow,” he says sadly.

 

“What _is_ the heartsong?”

 

“It is,” Nod looks lost for words. “Everything. Life. Death. Understanding. The heartsong is how we know ourselves in darkness, and recognize others,” he makes a grumpy noise. “Your language is—limiting.”

 

“You speak it okay,” she says defensively.

 

“The words do not—there is no meaning, no truth,” he says.

 

Clearly he’s never read poetry. “There is--.”

 

“You cannot reach out and touch—someone else. You cannot make heartsong meld. My heartsong is fast and happy,” he gestures for her to place a hand on his chest, and she feels more scars underneath her palm, but all she hears is ‘ _thub-dub-dub’_ and while it’s moving faster than hers, he is technically treading water so duh.

 

How does an Olympic swimmer get so many scars, though?

 

“Yours is slow and sad. Can you feel my heartsong?”

 

“I can only feel your heartbeat,” she says, taking her hand away. She nicks his skin accidently, and some skin peels away under her nail. “Oh my god, I’m sorry.”

 

“There is—no pain.”

 

She feels the skin under her nails, and she removes it. It feels gritty, and she rolls it between her fingers, trying to figure out why.

 

Probably the salt, she figures, and flicks it away.

 

“In the water, you could hear my heartsong,” he tells her, and she laughs.

 

“Sorry, it may not be cold for Olympic swimmers, but it would be for little old me, but nice try.”

 

He looks frustrated. “How do you not understand?”

 

“Understand what?”

 

“I am no—swimmer,” he says. “I am--,” he breaks off, his eyes briefly unfocusing, and he turns to the mouth of the cove. Moments later, Ronin pops up next to him, eyes chips of ice. When he turns that gaze on MK, she swallows loudly and tries not to show fear.

 

“It is not safe,” Ronin says. “You should go back on land.”

 

“What about you guys? If it’s not safe for me, it’s not safe for you.”

 

Ronin laughs harshly. “We are what it should be afraid of. Go now.”

 

Nod’s eyes plead for her to go, so she does, but she wonders about it later. What could they do that she couldn’t?

 

Apparently swim in chilly water.

 

There’s something not right about this, but she has no idea what it is, and it bothers her.

 

\--

 

“There is one thing that all mermaid tales agree on—that mermaids, like their siren cousins, can control the minds of men with their song. What they then do with those minds depends entirely on the story and the song.”

\--Bomba Radcliffe, “On Mermaids”

 

\--

 

It’s approaching September, and MK knows that when winter sets in, she won’t be able to go into the cove at all—the winds and assorted weather condition will make it impossible.

 

“What happens when winter comes?” she asks Nod.

 

He sports a new scar, over his side, starting from under his arm and descending down, under the water. She still hasn’t seen him completely, and she wonders why.

 

“My family and I find warmer waters to spend our time in.”

 

“Oh, so you’re snowbirds,” she nods. “You head down south—like Florida or something?”

 

“We are not _birds_ ,” Nod says, scandalized.

 

“It’s a slang term,” she says, “meaning someone who typically lives up north and goes south for the winter.”

 

Nod relaxes slightly. “We are sn-snowbirds of a sort,” he says awkwardly. “We leave at the equinox for warmer waters, and return at the next equinox. The journey takes some weeks.”

 

“You don’t fly?”

 

Nod stares at her. “We are _not_ birds.”

 

“Sorry,” she holds up her hands. “My mistake.”

 

“What are you making?” Nod looks at her sketchbook with interest, and she’s been wondering when he asks her about it. In response, she moves over to his side of the dinghy, showing him her sketches. “You render images,” he breathes. “That is a great talent indeed.”

 

“It’s not professional-grade,” she says, squirming a little. “I have a friend--.”

 

“Only certain people can render images,” Nod insists. “You are blessed.”

 

MK bites her tongue against the obvious retort. Nod’s great, in his weird way, but she’s not blessed, not by a long shot. But Nod’s excited, if the way he’s rippling the water around him is anything to go by. When she looks over at him, she sees the warm pinkishness of his skin suddenly turn grey as he lifts himself out of the water a little, and she stares.

 

“Nod? Why does your skin turn grey?”

 

He looks at her, and when he smiles, she sees the edges of his serrated teeth, his too-large eyes, and the lids—like there are two lids—and the strange slipperiness of his skin, and her eyes widen. She throws herself away from him, banging her elbow on the bench as she tries to get the engine started, but it sputters, and Nod’s face pops up out of the water. She rears back, sitting in the center of the dinghy, clutching her knees to her chest, and Nod rises up out of the water, climbing onto the dinghy, and now she sees how the human-seeming skin morphs into silvery skin beneath his waist, and she can see a fin sticking up out of it. “You’re a—you’re a mermaid,” she stammers, moving back as Nod moves toward her. The dinghy jerks, and she bites her lip to hold in the yelp. “Is that one of your friends? Are you going to drown me?”

 

“Mermaid,” he sighs, “such a strange word. I do not understand.”

 

“What do you call each other then?”

 

“People,” Nod says, looking at her strangely.  “We do not—call each other. And you are--,” he searches for the right word, “safe.”

 

“Not according to lore, I’m not,” she retorts.

 

His face works in confusion. “We do not hunt your kind.”

 

“ _Humans_ are my kind, and you hunt us, I’ve read the stories!”

 

“Stories lie,” he hisses, and his face changes slightly. She sees fangs from behind his lips. “We hunt the hunters. But the lonely ones, without a group, we do not hunt.”

 

“I have a group,” she babbles.

 

Nod shakes his head. “No.”

 

She starts to shake, and she wraps her arms around herself. Nod leans forward, gently grabbing her wrists and pulls them down. “We were told,” he says, “by Queen Dellaria, about you.”

 

“Queen Dellaria?”

 

“She rules the pod in these waters,” Nod says.

 

“ _Tiana_?”

 

“She said you called her that,” Nod jerks his head. “She said you did not have heartsong.”

 

“You said I have heartsong,” she says quickly.

 

“It is sad,” and he looks so sad for her, and she starts to wonder how much that concept is wrapped up in his culture. “Queen Tara agreed with Queen Dellaria. We give home to those without heartsong.”

 

“No,” she begs as he comes toward her again. “No, leave me alone.”

 

“Shh,” he murmurs, leaning over her. That’s when she realizes how big he is—he’s the size of a bull dolphin, at least. She’d thought he would’ve been tall on land, but the...tail is more than half his body size. She starts to hyperventilate as he frames her face with his hands, and his mouth quirks. “I will not harm you.”

 

“Says the guy currently hovering over me.”

 

“Hovering—I do not understand. I cannot fly.”

 

“What was the deal with the whole blood-sucking thing anyway?” she demands, angry. “I thought maybe you were just weird, but you did something, didn’t you?”

 

“It is something we all know,” he tells her. “Blood makes a tie. When our hands touch our third eyes, our eye that sees into the heartsong of all, after we have tasted blood, we can enter others’ minds. I took your knowledge of language, nothing more. We—do not have language.”

 

“Then how do you communicate?”

 

“Let me,” he says, letting one of his fangs appear. He removes his right hand from her head, biting deeply into his thumb. Blood beads when he removes it from his mouth, and he hisses in pain. She stares at it. It’s red, like her blood, and she thinks, _What wouldn’t Dad give to be a part of this?_

 

He moves his thumb toward her open mouth, and she snaps it shut instinctively. “Please—it is easier to communicate our way,” he says, smearing the blood across her lip. “It is—fair. Even. Equal.”

 

“I don’t want to take your blood,” she wails, but he stares at her, and his eyes dilate slightly. She gazes at him, transfixed, and when he says, “Lick your lips,” she does so, not even cringing at the salty taste. “Put your left hand on my forehead,” he orders, and she complies as he puts his right hand on her forehead, and she closes her eyes because he does and then—

 

_Lights. Moon under water. A woman with a silver tail and soft smile and_ Mother _and then she screeches_ SHARK _he fights she dies. He bleeds_ SHARK _Ronin spear fists dolphins._

_Tara. Goldtail. Queen. Family. Together. Wave riding._

_Watching_ HIM. _Human who knows things. Too many things. Death to human. They surround his boat. His strange tools underneath. He doesn’t know they’re there. He thinks they’re away._ HE _thinks he knows. He doesn’t know. They ready spears_

“—no _!_ ”

 

_but then Tara calls. Away. Watching the orange bob above. Wondering. Always wondering._

_Girl. No heartsong. Even_ HE _has heartsong._

_Revenge on_ HIM _, help her._

_Help._

_Help._

_Help_ her.

 

MK stares up at him, chest heaving. Is that how they communicate? Through images, not words? His smile is gentle, and he smoothes back her hair. She catches the stray thought that “too dry,” and she presses her back into the bottom of the dinghy.

 

That displeases him, if smacking his tail on the water is anything to go by. “Hurt you not,” he protests, framing her face with his hands again. “No darkness.”

 

Darkness equals danger, she translates in her mind, and Nod smiles again.

 

She hears strains of music, and she blinks, looking for it. Nod grabs one of her hands and puts it over his heart. “Heartsong,” he says, and she lets her hand relax against his skin, listening.

 

His heartsong is a complicated, fast, happy-sounding melody. There are deeper bits to it, _grief_ , she realizes after a moment, but his song fills her with contentment.

 

When he places his hand over her heart, inclining his head, she waits to hear what her song is.

 

She can’t hear anything.

 

Her eyelids fly open, and she stares at him. He nods. “Heartsong sad,” he says, “barely no melody. We shall restore.”

 

“How?” she asks.

 

He leans forward and kisses her. His lips are cool, and his tongue traces her lips and her teeth. He finds it curious—what mates he’s had have bitten him in their frenzy, but her teeth would not bite him—and she cringes back at the memory of serrated teeth on sensitive skin, but he follows, keeping their lips firmly placed together, and he’s doing something, she can tell, but she doesn’t know what.

 

She hears the motor of her father’s boat, but Nod ignores it, moving his hands under her sweatshirt and removing his lips from hers long enough to peel off her sweatshirt and shirt underneath it. She doesn’t know why he’s doing that, but he attaches himself to her again, and he tries to twine her tongue to follow his dance as he unhooks her bra and pushes off her shorts. There’s nothing sexual in the movements—he just wants her clothes off her. Her shoes are already off, and she catches a wave of gratitude for it.

 

_Why?_

 

She gets flashes of silver darts in water, of fins, of the glimmer of magic at sunset as Tara calls them together, of legs fusing together, and she starts to panic just as she hears, “Hey! Get away from my daughter!”

 

Nod snarls at him, that deep sound that had frightened her when Ronin did it, before wrapping his arms around her and thrusting off the boat deep into the water. She struggles, but his hold is tight as he dives down. The pressure makes her ears pop, and her legs start to feel like there are Charlie horses everywhere, and she opens her mouth to gasp in pain and takes in water. Nod changes the angle so they’re ascending, and when they come up, he holds onto her as she coughs and shudders in his arms. Her legs aren’t moving independently anymore, and when she looks down, her legs aren’t legs anymore. “What did you do?” she gasps out, trying to rip herself out of Nod’s grasp.

 

He won’t let her, and she sees other mermaids pop their heads up out of the water singing some sort of wordless melody, and her skin creeps at the sound. They’re—initiating her. Into something.

 

“Healing heartsong,” he says, and she seizes, and she would have drifted down if his hold was looser. Her lungs seem to be collapsing, and she can’t get enough air and her legs _hurt_ , but Nod won’t let go of her, and the singing is increasing in pitch and tempo, and her heart is fluttering in her ribcage.

 

Images start to flash through her head— _straining legs in the depths, dolphins, jellyfish_ BAD _she is warned, light in kelp forest, ships with their tinny sound it hurts, the glow of goldtail in light, the colors of the mating frenzy, silver bodies against silver bodies, orcas_ CAREFUL _not all good not all bad,_ SHARKS _, humans_ humans HUMANS _._

The song abruptly cuts off, and MK lags in Nod’s hold, spent. Her legs are gone, and in their place is a silver tail with a tinge of green. Her hair has come loose from her ponytail in her shaking, and it goes down her back like the other females. The water’s not cold anymore, it’s comfortable, and Nod’s arms feel like home.

 

He dragged her into this. Why is he home?

 

_Blood, shared blood, hand to eye hand to eye_ , she sees, with the gold undertone that must be Tara. She turns, Nod’s hand still on her, and the queen is swimming toward her. She smiles, and MK’s worries melt away. Tara’s heartsong is overpowering, a deep melodic harmony that rises above the other heartsong as the dominant melody. Behind her is Ronin, and his smile is gentle too, and she sees _home she is home_.

 

Tara opens her arms, and MK swims into them, and she is home.

 

\--

 

“There isn’t any hard evidence to prove it, but numerous sightings do at least imply causation, that mermaids and dolphins somehow go together. Like dolphins, mermaids are found all over the world, and while it was originally thought that superstitious sailors somehow mixed up dolphins with mermaids, or manatees with mermaids (which is ridiculous, due to the fact that only no manatee species travels in deep ocean), perhaps the truth lies in that mermaids, while traveling, will travel with dolphins. The question remains: why? For safety? For community? There are still no answers.”

\--Bomba Radcliffe, “Mermaids and Dolphins: The Missing Link”

\--

 

_Finis_.

**Author's Note:**

> This is what happens after I watch Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides and see the POTC!au art that kemiobsesses drew.


End file.
